And yet the brouhaha stirred up by cartoons in which the prophet Mohammad wears a bomb-shaped turban and announces that heaven has run out of virgins "must," as a Danish prince once said, "give us pause." Over the past weeks, far from promoting peace, laughter in one country has provoked protests, outrage and boycotts in many others. Ambassadors have been recalled, flags burned.
With demonstrators carrying crudely written signs from Palestine to Indonesia, with Danish products being removed from supermarket shelves in the Middle East, with feelings inflamed throughout the Islamic world and with Danish politicians apologizing, if not for their free press then for having offended so many people, even the most determined laughers should be shaken. Humor brings people together except when it tears them apart.
Though citizens of Copenhagen quoted by the BBC object that the cartoons were "only jokes," wishing for less intensity or more irony from the offended Muslim masses is an expression of cultural self-righteousness that is not going to advance the debate. The truth is that all of us have limits in what we are willing to treat lightly.
The free-press arguments offered by defenders of the cartoons also miss a key point: The question is not whether newspapers ought to have the right to print any cartoons they choose but whether papers should have chosen to print these cartoons. In societies that value free speech, one has the right to tease or mock someone in whatever terms one chooses, but taking full advantage of this right runs the risk that your interlocutor will become enraged and express his anger in ways that go beyond mere speech. So, this is not a matter of rights only but of tact, sensitivity, even self-preservation.
A joke that circulated during an earlier West-Islam controversy captures the spirit of the situation. After Salman Rushdie's "Satanic Verses" brought an Iranian fatwa down on him, people asked, "Have you heard the title of Rushdie's next novel? " The (expletive-deleted) answer was, "Buddha, You Fat F@#*." It's easier, the joke implied, to condemn other people's intolerance than to see that humor can cut them to the core.
Paul Lewis, professor of English at Boston College, is the author of "Cracking Up: American Humor in a Time of Conflict," to be published by the University of Chicago Press.
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